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Tuesday, 30 August 2011

My new favourite place

We live in a shoebox apartment. It has a small washer dryer unit, that only takes three towels at a time (I'm exaggerating of course, but not by much...) and never dries anything properly, unless you put your load of washing through two dryer cycles, which take 150 minutes each. Ridiculous, and a huge drain on power. So we have a clothes horse permanently set up in our lounge room, which is a little annoying.

The washer dryer has been playing up lately, not cooperating with every load. Sometimes it would work, other times it would do this annoying thing where the dial would just click around and around, and it wouldn't wash or dry anything. Then of course there was the night that it stuck on the wash cycle and it took me about five hours to realise (it was night time, and I'd gone to bed, and woke up at about 2am to the noise of the machine still running. Grrrr). We had quite a washing pile by the end of last week, before we headed to Napier. I had to buy X new clothes so I had enough to pack for the weekend and for his camp trip. As soon as we got back Sunday night I put a load of clothes on to wash. And the washing machine wouldn't work. Not good. Not good at all. I sighed, and gave up on the machine, making plans in my head to check out laundry services and self-service laundromats first thing the next morning.

On Monday I researched the local laundry service, and after some discussion with Deane we decided it wasn't worth paying $20 for pick up and delivery, when we had a self-service laundromat across the road from the boys' school, and I could do it myself. So that afternoon I lugged two large rubbish bags full of clothes (I kid you not) to the laundromat, armed myself with an arsenal of $1 coins, and away I went. I filled one of the commercial 16kg washing machines with clothes (some of which were dripping wet, thanks to the useless washer dryer at home) and bunged in the required $5, added my laundry liquid and pressed start. Then I loaded another smaller machine with another load, which cost $3. 15 minutes later, the first load was done, and it went straight into a 16kg dryer for 30 minutes ($3). The other smaller load took a little over 30 minutes, but only took 20 minutes in the dryer ($2). And that was it. Washed, and dried, in less than an hour. This pile of clothing would have taken me the better part of a week to do at home, and for the cost of $13 and an hour of my time, it was done. I was shocked and amazed.

Full of excitement, I decided to try this speed-laundry jaunt again. This morning I carted another two large rubbish bags to the laundromat - one choc-full of towels, the other with bed linens. Two 15 minute 16kg washes and two half hour 16kg dries later (a total of $16) and I was done. My giant pile of washing that would have taken two weeks, was done in two hours. And I got a good chunk of knitting done while I was at it. I think I'm in love with the laundromat.